Headlong, by Michael Frayn (Faber, £6.99 in UK)

John Mortimer meets David Lodge in this likeable, almost funny, over-plotted, good-ish English farce which has its moments but seems destined to live in the mind mainly as one of the more unlikely of the many unlikely Booker contenders. Narrator Martin Clay is determined to change his life. Meanwhile he, his wife and their small baby are off to their country cottage; she has a scholarly text to complete, he thinks he has a book to write. Though a philosopher attempting to become an art historian Martin is at best an intellectual drifter, happy in his domestic life yet given to darker interludes of Faustian anguish. A chance visit to the local decaying Big House presents him with the scam of a lifetime. While the main plot and the characters evoke one TV sitcom too many, the lengthy art history passages which centre on Bruegel, patriarch of a remarkable clan of Flemish painters, are easily the best parts of the book. In the end Martin gets away with everything and nothing - as does Frayn himself.